This was just what I wanted—liberty to invade what would have been deemed a privacy even by the Cantonese; but the acres of unkept, overgrown wilderness, with its rotting pavilions, tumble-down temples, dried-up lakes, crumbling rockwork, and broken seats and tables, formed the spring of all the impressions I afterwards received in and about Canton. Nothing so dreary—not even Vauxhall on a wet Christmas Day—ever could be imagined. It was not the breakdown of acute organic lesion, but the decay of long, long-continued atrophy: and I formed a theory at the moment, which the appearance of every other yamun, or temple, strengthened, that the Chinese had for ages so jealously shut up their vaunted city, not from any terror of the barbarians becoming acquainted with their secrets of trade, government, or manufacture, but from a positive idea of shame that any one should see the mouldering neglected “lions” of their southern capital. True to the estimated value of their _curios_, everything was in a state of “crackle.” Combine all you can call to mind of dreary places—Miss Linwood’s old room in Leicester Square, and the present aspect of the Square itself; the gaunt, cheerless show-rooms of palaces generally: the “Moated Grange” and “Haunted House;” the old pavilion on Monkey Island, and indeed “pavilions” generally, from that in Hans Place to any damp ceiling-stained summer-house, dedicated to friendship or nature, that you know of—mix them together, and extract their essence, and then you will not have the least idea of the general rot and ruin that is spreading, like an ulcer, throughout Canton. William Hogarth: PAINTER, ENGRAVER, AND PHILOSOPHER. _Essays on the Man, the Work, and the Time._ III.—A LONG LADDER, AND HARD TO CLIMB.